A teacher in Austin, TX reprimanded a student for demonstrating Linux to his classmates and distributing free Linux CDs. She then goes on to contact Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, who provided the CDs, and claim that "putting Linux on these machines is holding our kids back" and "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful". Although she claims to have used Linux herself in college, she feels that "putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all". On the HeliOS blog, Ken Starks hints that this may be more than just ignorance of the teacher's part.

The teacher (as much as I want to disagree) might have a point and here is why. When those kids finish school, when they are applying for a job they will be asked "Do you have MS Office skills", "Active Directory", "Lotus Notes"? -- what will they say? Oh hmm, wait, let me see I have "AbiWord skills", hmm oh yea, one sec, I also have "OpenOffice.ORG" skills -- right, good luck to them getting a job. No offense but this is the way it looks to me. As far as the teacher is concerned, she should not have said anything and should have gone with the flow.

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If you understand the mechanics for OpenOffice.ORG or Abiword, I doubt it's a huge leap to understand how to use Microsoft Office. Aside from that, it's not like the student was formatting everyone's hard drive and saying "From now on, we will only use linux!!"

He was simply showing a commonly used OS, and if that teacher had any vision, she would have encouraged her students to persue an interest in technology.

I wish the school's address was posted so I could send them a kind letter letting them now what a joke their tech. education is.